Facebook - candidates beware

[Simon Benford]

20% of employers use “social networking” sites to run searches on job applicants
- 68% of employers use search engines to check on candidates

More and more firms are using internet social networking websites to perform checks on potential employees, according to business recently surveyed.

In a survey of employers, 20% said they had used sites such as Friends Reunited and MySpace to run searches on job applicants at some stage during the recruitment process. The sites give users the opportunity to post and share information about themselves, and an increasing number of recruiters are going online to assess the suitability of candidates and for ‘character checks.’ 68% professed to using search engines such as Yahoo! and Google, while 60% explored blogs.

As the popularity of these websites increases, they are expected to become an even more common tool for hiring new recruits. Membership levels are particularly high amongst younger people and this has not escaped the notice of employers seeking to fill graduate roles. Around 65% of university students have a Facebook account for instance, a site which has grown dramatically over the past year. Facebook currently boasts over 3.5million users in the UK compared with 500,000 in October 2006. A third of those who have joined MySpace - the largest social website driven by user-generated content - are aged between 18 and 34.

The research may worry some candidates – particularly those who bare all on their web pages. But they should not panic. Most employers looking at these sites are not trying to catch applicants out, but trying to get a better picture of a person overall or find out things that a piece of paper can’t say. It’s important to remember that firms want rounded individuals and people who’ll fit in, and social networking sites can be a good source of information about someone’s interests and how outgoing they are.

While employers may be able to discover new things about prospective employees - that there isn’t room to say on a CV - going online is no substitute for meeting a candidate face-to-face. Experience, interviews and psychometric testing will continue to count for anything else when applying for a position. It might seem like Big Brother is watching but the best advice has to be to relax and be yourself. If you are in the market for a new job it does make sense to make sure there is nothing online that you would not be entirely comfortable for your prospective employer to see. Don’t get caught in flagrante delicto.”